my handmade show,3,4 5 6 and 8"fun....

[Pyrophury]

As someone pointed out earlier, I am in a different hemisphere, so I have to take into account other laws than my US colleagues have to abide to . So posting stuff openly on youtube is not something I aspire.

 

Seems a bit overcautious to me, but understandable I suppose.

 

What problems did you have with the parlon prime from the PDF pyrophury?? How was the prime called in the PDF?? perhaps I can help.

 

I think the formula ExplosiveCoek was referring to above, which was featured in his video in this post, is:

 

Meal powder - 75

Parlon - 12.5

Black Iron Oxide - 8.3

Red gum - 5

(60 mesh titanium can be added to create sparks)

 

This is applied in a 1mm layer, then a 1.5mm layer of Meal +7% redgum using 50/50 alcohol and acetone as the solvent.

 

It didn't work for me though, it failed to create a smoldering slag and didn't stick to the core or get hot enough to ignite my microstars. I also found it extremely difficult to roll, most of the composition just got stuck to the sides of the star roller and set like concrete. So I'm very skeptical about trying that one again.

Edited July 5, 2013 by Pyrophury

[fredhappy]

#ivars: I do not want to take any credit to those great salute ring canisters, these were made by my friend canisterman. They were awesome, and I will soon try and make a first canister shell myself. I was very impressed by those cans.

 

#pyrophury: your experience is both strange as interesting. I ve used the exact same formulae to prime my lead based crackling cores, and they performed the same as commercial crackling ( see clips of show) . I d added the 0-250 micron titanium ( about 15%) for added sparks and this also worked.A 1 mm layer gave me about 1.5 seconds of delay. Just to set the record straight, 2 mm crackling cores+ 1mm of this special prime means your stars should come out 4 mm. With added BP prime ( I use fencepost) the crackling comes out as 6 mm small stars. These can be broken hard and will still ignite.I ve used them in petals for large caliber shells, and the petals were symetrical also.

 

What kind of meal powder did you use, with what kind of charcoal? I ve found that the quality of the iron oxide matters a lot. I had an old batch of bad quality and everything I'd made with that stuff failed me....glitters, special primes..it sucked. So using good quality iron oxide might make a difference.

 

I hear you on the dificulty rolling it onto the lead based cores. My lead based cores were rolled with NC laquer. I had a hard time rolling it onto the cores properly. I'd used dextrine in that special prime, so sticking a dextrine based prime on a NC based crackling core was a bit of a hassle, but eventually it worked and the cores started picking up compo.

 

#viking: thanks bro! I always enjoy your clips, and like the way you experiment. Also, the footage is always of good quality..please keep it up!

[Mumbles]

For me personally, I just don't like being the 9th person in a row to just say "nice shells". Fred, the stuff you make is always so gorgeous. Even if I tried there is very little room for critique. It's just sometimes hard to have meaningful conversations about something that is typically so high quality besides telling myself that I need to step it up.

[JFeve81]

Well you do make nice stuff. Good job, awesome shells. I will admit the reason I didn't comment is because everybody said everything I would have said. I find it boring reading through a bunch of the same comments over and over.

[WonderBoy]

and I will soon try and make a first canister shell myself.

That is what I like to hear Cylinders are the way to go.

 

And I agree with Mum, you produce some such nice shells, there's not much to critique! Plus, ball shells are not my forte. I recently made a few stars from the Spanish PDF, so far I like what I see. I will have to post more on the results once I shoot the shells.

 

What kind of timing were you going for on that last studata that was shot separately? And what priming method of the fuse?

 

 

WB

[fredhappy]

#mumbles+JFeve81: thanks kindly for your comments, I really appreciate.

 

I had a bit of a moan, I am not cut out very well for internet to be honest, I like personal contact...the ability to look someone in the eye and have a personal conversation. I guess I am a bit of an old fart I.. do like the international character of this forum, and read most of the topics. Also, I do understand the reluctance to repeat other comments a bit better now.

 

wonderboy; thx man, I like your cylinders too. I never had any experience with cilinders, but my friend canisterman makes them very well. The first time I experienced one I did a flying kick in the air out of pure exitement.I love the fact that you can really load them with a substantial amount of material, and also stack them high..hehe..

 

The Spanish PDF...I cannot stress enough the importance of this document for me. I have made small displays exclusively using these formulaes and they are very very nice. They give a nice high end look to everything, the formuleas are just a little bit out of the ordinary. But, there are some other formulaes I appreciate more then those in the PDF. Buel red is just a big favourite of mine. It is a nice deep carbonate red. The spanish red is also ok, but a bit more washed out for my taste. Also, the blueno1 is a very nice pastel blue,and quite bright, but I love the simplicity and deep tone of shimizu B70.Those are 2 of my personal favourites, buel red and B70.. I also like the hardt streamer formuleas a lot, such as the gold brocade.

 

I also like adding 10% coarse Fe/Ti ( 250-450 micron) to colour formulaes. It gives a nice tail and contrast. This works best for red stars , blue tends to be a bit washed out when Fe/Ti is added, although it still is a nice effect.

 

The timings for the stutata were quite simple...14x2.5" snugly fit in 1x8"ballshell . So I enjoy timing them in groups of 7. the first 7 on 2.5 seconds, the other 7 on 3.5 or 4 seconds. I crossmatch everything, which is a lot of work, but never once did I have a dud with this method. I have experimented with progressive timings, but as marks0265 pointed out before, this gives a bit of a messy look. It is more pleasing to have everything go of in one or two waves. VH718 makes very nice high quality 2.5"shells, I'd love to see an 8"er filled with those.

Edited July 5, 2013 by fredhappy

[Bobosan]

Fred, just keep up the good work. I really do enjoy your shells just as everyone else does and appreciate the time and effort that goes into them. Sometimes when I view everyones work, I am awestruck to the point that a "nice shells" comment just doesn't really do them justice. Everyone's vids gives me an idea of what to strive for when I do start shell construction and testing.

 

Keep 'em coming.

[Seymour]

Just quickly, a personal note on the video withdrawal and lack of commenting. I fully understand your concern about youtube, but it does make it difficult. I admit I'm pretty good at having an APC open on my browser many hours a day, but only scratching the surface when it comes to looking through the forum fully on a regular basis. There was a time that I tried to read all new posts and the whole forum posted already, but now I guess I have a job and other hobbies and know that's unrealistic. When you mentioned your new shells in the chat room I don't know how long they had been there, but I expect it could have been a few days. I had a quick look then, but it was very late, I was tired and off to an overnight job early the next morning, and when I got back your videos were taken down already. They may have been there a reasonable length of time, but for me it was unfortunately not enough.

 

Anyway, thank you for re posting them

 

I have yet to try many of the formulas in the Spanish Document, but I have studied it as intensely as you can with near no Spanish, but to be hones since you can get the chemicals very easily and numbers are the same, I feel I can decipher it relatively well. The white strobe is very pleasing, and solves all the problems I had with the traditional formula (Blesser?) shimmering. I get the feeling all the formulas are very nicely tuned like this, and for such a small text it does cover a very large range of effects, not everything obviously, but if you "had to restrict yourself" to the formulas in this text you could do everything in an average commercial display. As Fred said he has done an entire display with it. Several I believe!

 

This Parlon prime, to me this is screaming for Titanium. I note that the writer mentions Ti in the text below. I'm quite confident they are explaining how to make Dragon Flowers (especially since I'm not the only one with this idea) That mix seems like a novel different method for getting a ball of slag sticking to the core to the more commonly cited "loading it with sulfur". Perhaps it is cleaner too when the dragon egg explodes scattering the Titanium? You mention you have done this Fred and Pyrophury, how clean was it? I have to say, I don't see any reason to use this without Titanium (or other metal) since that's why you want it to form a solid cinder. If a 'dark' delay is all you are after, I'd just use something like 50% Pine charcoal, 45% BP (pine), 5% dextrin (or just TT or brocade for effect ) It's probably not quite as dim, but I feel that burning parlon at low temperatures might not give off the best fumes, and I'd shy away from doing this unnecessarily. Or I'm paranoid (not unlikely).

 

Pyropphury, I'll second Fredhappy and suggest you just add 4% dextrin and roll it like that. Also, definitely add Titanium. I think Fred's 15% is about on mark. You can get more in, but it's not worth the hassle or the cost, 15% is plenty of effect (and enough Ti to have some difficulty getting it to all stick).

 

While the crackle effect from plain dragon eggs is really nice (and definitely clean) I definitely think you should use the Titanium version more. As fantastic as your Dragon egg Statatas were, I want you to make another copy of them just the same but with Dragon Flowers!

 

Canisterman: Those salute rings were tight. The timing was some of the best I've seen. I also approve of your Dragon egg batch size. Keep it up !

 

On the topic of making dragon eggs, I have never rolled them, always granulating them. Is there any benefit to rolling them? It just seems to me that something that small is a pain to roll, since that's all in the hardest part of star making with them that small. I understand that with care you will be able to get very nice sizing, but I think that unless you are making many kilos, granulating will probably be faster, even if you are screening out a tight grade (like 10-12 mesh) and re processing the fines (though I advise you keep everything to 20 mesh, it is good for other crackling effects, comets and such when perfect sizing is not needed.

 

wonderboy; thx man, I like your cylinders too. I never had any experience with cilinders, but my friend canisterman makes them very well. The first time I experienced one I did a flying kick in the air out of pure exitement.I love the fact that you can really load them with a substantial amount of material, and also stack them high..hehe..

 

All very true! I have a special place in my heart for spherical shells. I grew up with them. However Canisters are fully just as amazing. I won't say more amazing, because look at Fred's 5" double petal with Red to strobe. You can't tell me that any canister is better than that or any of the premium ball shells others make (youtube videos of Japanese shells have shown us this), but nor can you say that any of those premium Balls are better than premium cans. I want both please.

 

I do understand fredhappy's criticism. For me, too, I've uploaded sometimes stuff and nobody cares about it. This crackling comp, I've already posted about it (working, with vid etc) an entire year ago.

 

I'm sad to hear you say that you think no body cares about it. I've had heaps of times when I've had little response from a detailed post, and I know it's frustrating at times, but ultimately I think this is just inevitable unfortunately. However I don't think that just because people are not articulating appreciation a lot of the time does not mean that it's not actually appreciated and valued. Maybe in several years a post that got little response will be linked to and create a new and lively debate?

 

This Crackle you have made, is that the Spanish formula with Lead swapped for Bismuth?

Edited July 6, 2013 by Seymour

[ExplosiveCoek]

Pyrophury that's really strange. I found that this glitter comp that you're rolling on the crackling is an extremely well sticking glitter (when it's burning). It's quite a problem to get compositions (water based) to stick to acetone bound comps, that's true. But for me too, I've just rolled the last layer (not the glitter) wit regular dextrine. I think that you can omit the red gum from the glitter comp, and insert dextrine to make that water bound too. I'm still not sure of the contributing effect of the parlon, and I even think it's superfluous. The important part is, like Seymour described, to get this glitter comp to stick to the dragon egg. I don't think that only a bp priming will work as wel as this glitter comp does Seymour. A lot of people have problems with their DE exploding, and I like to believe that this glitter slag (which is extremely hot) aids in the ignition proces of the DE. Especially when travelling through the air.

 

The crackle in my vid was just an crackle mix optimized for the expensive bitmuthtrioxide. However after that I found the Spanish PDF and haven't used anything else than that leadbased crackling anymore. It works extremely well, even unprimed.

 

Here a small pile of some unprimed DE in some MCRH:

This is the lead comp from the spanish PDF.

 

Of course you can still use the DE prime without Ti, and this is what I would advise to do until you get them working. I've even used as much as 20% Ti in my smolder comp, although my crackling egg's are a little smaller than Fred used to roll them. We like to roll them because it's easier to apply priming and time them appropriate . Also I want to try to start from granulating the lead compo through a mesh screen and try to roll those further. I also have been trying to use dextrine as a binder for the DE but I got variable results so far in their performance.

[Seymour]

I should have clarified that I was not suggesting throwing the high charcoal delay straight on my crackle, but on pre primed crackle. The delay mix would be primed too of course. I also happen to agree with your use of a glitter prime here. For a while I used some silver glitter mixes as a effect and prime for coloured cores and would add small dragon eggs to the first coating over the core, so that as the colour came out of the glitter it sizzled.

 

I've had mixed results with Dextrin too sometimes great, other times a reaction of some sort seems to occur. I had to leave it wet for days and then re wet it to really kill it though.

 

You can get up to 30% Ti in the Dragon flowers, but that's really not worth it. What is the Bismuth one you use? I use 37.5% Bismuth trioxide, 37.5% CuO, 25% MgAl and +5% double base. Someone else created this formula. I can't remember their name today. I use -100 MgAl for sizzling, multi pops or small dragon eggs (single pop), and 60-100 mesh for medium and ridiculous single pop eggs (2-4mm) It may or may not be the best crakcle formula,but I tried quite a few others and have no plans on changing. It can be tweaked to give any effect I want without much difficulty.

[fredhappy]

#seymour: I hear you on leaving the links active for a little bit longer. Imo a thread has run its course when there are no replies posted for days on end. I now understand that not everyone sees everything the moment it is being posted, so I ve learned something.

 

on dragon egg prime/dragon eggs:

 

You are right about the titanium. But in the text below the prime the author clearly states that adding titanium will give you the dragon flower effect. For this particular batch of crackling I'd added 13% next time I will up the amount to 25 or 30%, I am convinced the effect will benefit from that percentage. The issue with the dragon egg stutatas was that I d shot them a bit high . I always shoot high when doing these shows, just for the sake of safety and feeling at ease personally.

 

I do see a large advantage on rolling the cores..which is timing! My friend canisterman has obtained a 2 mm screen especially for dragon eggs. He intends to roll a new batch and screen it accurately. The advantage over granulating is that when using these screened dragon egg cores as star cores, you get a very nice Japanese style timed crackling effect. The batch I d used for my show was pretty uniform , so even with the crackling effect there was a nice symmetry.

 

here is a clip of mine of some tests I did for my inserts and to check if my priming was ok to give me 100% ignition. I always do these tests before I light anything for an audience. I count the stars, note down the numbers, fire my tests, slowdown the playback and recount my stars. If the ignition rate is less then 100% I don't use that batch for a show. I am very particular about this.

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlBh3akYIUA

breaks were a bit lower with these tests, and yes, I was extremely happy with the crackling as you can hear in the end..

I ve also dialed the amount of flash back a bit with the 2 and 2.5"ers I d used in my show , the spread was a bit too much for my taste.

 

The bismuth formulae you've posted works very well. I ve made some crackling comets with granulated crackling with that one , and they were very loud.

 

strangely....the audience wasn't too impressed with the whole crackling effect. I thought this was quite funny. Since the Chinese cakes are laden with crackling effects, they were used to it I guess. Colour to strobe was a different case, they really liked that one. The strobe from the PDF works every time, but priming is a hassle. I d used the monocapa prime from the PDF, but i ve been told that the best way is to use the white no 1 prime, and do a stepprime.Primed this way the strobes can be broken hard , ignite instantly and even give a symetrical look to your break. I'll make a new batch and try improve my strobe breaks a bit more.

 

best

 

fred

[Seymour]

I get the emphasis on perfect timing and will admit that it is something I aim to improve on in some dragon flowers I've made, though I believe I can improve a lot just by better controlling the layer of titanium smolder mix and still just using granulated crackle (though screen disciplined nearly the same size ones).

 

If we are to get perfectionist though I'm going to stand my ground.

 

A very small grain is all that is required to get a sharp crack, less than a millimeter as we know. Even 2mm, while a serious dragon egg size, is small enough that having an inert core is almost an unacceptable use of space for a non active component. I think the solution is to granulate then roll to size, using granulated dragon eggs as cores for the rolled and screen sized cores.

 

As for priming crackle and what it takes to make it go off, I too have experienced plenty of variability in what it takes to set it off.

 

- I've had stuff that needed a hot prime.

 

-I've had stuff that partially exploded and blew the rest blind if you used a hot prime, but worked great with just the dragon flower slag mix as the prime, or in a black powder/charcoal type effect.

 

-I've had dragon eggs that go off on command just because you want them to. They just always light.

 

Generally more copper oxide and finer copper oxide and lead/bismuth oxides help with ignitability. The rest is tuning the metal and to an extent the binder.

 

I am a little confused... I assumed the dragon eggs in your inserts had no Ti. Is that true or is it not showing up well on the camera?

 

I think I've used chunkier Ti than almost everyone here. 40 mesh would be typical for me. Each dragon flower makes a big spark hit with long lasting sparks (read fallout if you wish).

 

I think the cleanliness of finer would be good, but chunky is great too.

[Dean411]

Very nice mines and shells Fred. And thanks for the video.

I really enjoy watching everyone's video but alas I am guilty of not posting comments and will try and change this in the future.

 

Dean

[Excal]

Very nice!,,thanks for the vids.

[fredhappy]

#seymour: I use very small steel cores as inert core. These cores are so small the overall effect on thickness is negligible. They however have sufficient mass to make the startup phase of rolling a batch very easy, I love these small steel cores. Screened round stars are always perfectly timed, I just like that method. I ve tried granulating and rolling bismuth crackling a couple of times, and it just didn't work for me.

 

I hear you on the subtle changes in performance/ignitability between batches. I had the bismuth formulea you' ve posted working. Then I decided to use a coffeemill to make my bismuth trioxide a bit finer. I thought, the finer the better, I was hoping for a louder report. The exact same formulea, with the same chemicals and the same ratios, that had worked perfectly before, did not work anymore when I milled my bismuth trioxide. Crackling can be a truly maddening effect to dial in correctly..

 

I did use titanium 0-250 micron, about 13/15%. There was a dragon eggs effect, but the camera doesn't pick it up very well with high altitude breaks.Next time I will use a more coarse mesh size, but the mere word " fallout" raises my hairs a bit. Due to the overpopulated situation here, any fallout is to be avoided. I take great care in making sure no sparks/fallout will rain down. Buildings everywhere here, there is little margin for error.

 

#dean: thx! comments are always nice and encouraging to keep making the effort of uploading and posting. I like all the clips of the small 4th of july shows uploaded on this board,fireworks are so labour intensive, there's a lot of dedication here. I am not some kind of threehugger, but I do believe in positive encouragement as a stimulus to keep sharing footage...let's try and keep it up..

[CANISTERMAN]

he fred, I was wondering if you are at home this weekend.

I like to show you my 8" Can i'm making.

The Can can hold 39 two inch shells filled with flash and Ti.

That will be a nice one.